Who Should Control the World Wide Web?

Information Management Journal, Jan/Feb 2006 by Swartz, Nikki

The United States has retained its crown as king of the World Wide Web, but only after a long and, at times, contentious struggle with the rest of the world.

During the World Summit on the Information Society held in Tunisia in November, negotiators from more than 100 countries agreed to leave the United States in charge of the Internet's addressing system to avoid a larger U.S.- European Union (EU) battle.

The accord, which for now ends four years of high-level Internet governance talks, called for the establishment of a new international group to give more countries a larger say in how the Internet works, including the issue of making domain names - currently created in the Latin languages - into other languages, such as Chinese, Urdu, and Arabic.

Under the terms of the compromise, the Internet Governance Forum would be created to address concerns. The new group, however, will have no binding authority beyond bringing stakeholders to the table to discuss the issues affecting the Internet and its use.

U.S. officials said the deal means the United States will leave daily management to the private sector through a quasi-independent, nonprofit organization called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

ICANN is a central authority in an essentially decentralized, neutral, and ungoverned global network of networks. ICANN runs the addressing system, giving out blocks of unique identifiers to countries and private registries so that one computer can easily find another.

This also means that when France or Britain loses the use of its Internet domain - .fr or .co.uk - it has to seek help from the California agency that reports to the U.S. Commerce Department.

That is why countries have pushed to transfer control of the Internet to the United Nations or another international body. The EU says the Internet is an international resource whose center of gravity must move away from Washington. The EU has called for a new intergovernmental body to set the principles for running the Internet and says the solitary American relationship with ICANN "is not sustainable" in the long term.

The summit was originally conceived to address the digital divide - the gap between information haves and have-nots - by raising both consciousness and funds for projects. Worldwide, just 14 percent of the population is online, compared with 62 percent for the United States and an even higher ratio in some Western European countries, according to the International Telecommunication Union.